A year ago Startup Giraffe was born.  Looking back it’s amazing how far we’ve come.  Like most business, our first few months was about getting our head above water, earning enough to pay rent, tweaking our business model and learning the legal, accounting and general ins and outs of starting a new company.  We made [...]

Congratulations to you, budding entrepreneur! You’ve successfully navigated the difficult, even emotional process of slimming down your grand product vision into a lean, focused MVP, and more importantly have gotten it built and launched. While you haven’t yet gone full tilt on marketing and customer acquisition, you are starting to see some traction, maybe some [...]

Get paid to launch startups, become the tech co-founder of your favorite one StartupGiraffe.com helps entrepreneurs refine, design and build the first version of their startups. Our typical project takes 6 weeks from idea to beta. We’ve launched 10 startups in the last 10 months including stereogrid.com, therunthrough.com, undergroundeats.com, vestorly.com and eatdrinkjobs.com. We’re looking for [...]

How do you validate your startup idea and start gaining early traction, without spending a ton of time and money building software? Delay complexity as long as possible by doing things manually. “Fake it till you make it.” Below are some examples of how successful companies smoke / ghetto / wizard of oz tested their [...]

by: John “Chief NerdGiraffe” Cihocki You probably hear about “the cloud” all the time, and how it’s fundamentally and rapidly changing the way internet technology is conceived and developed. But what does it mean for you, the tech entrepreneur with a tight budget, perhaps little or no technical skills, and limited runway? In reality, “cloud” [...]

On Oct 20th, I was invited to give a talk at NYU Stern as part of the Entrepreneurship Speaker Series. Below is a video of the talk, key takeaways and my slides. Enjoy. Video Key Takeaways Investment and tech talent is earned not given.  What can you do to further your idea on your own? [...]

For most people the idea of launching a half-baked product is horrifying. You’ve been talking up your idea for months, been working crazy hours and even taken money from friends and family. This is the first time people will be seeing what you’ve been dreaming about and you want everything to be perfect. You feel [...]

We speak with a ton of idea stage entrepreneurs. Many times, people think we’re going to “Zuckerberg their Winklevoss” and steal whatever brilliant ideas they have. Because of this, they speak in generalizations and vagaries (it’s like LinkedIn meets Yelp for Healthcare with Farmville-style gamification). Unfortunately if you don’t tell us the details and motivations [...]

In our first few months working on Startup Giraffe, we’ve personally met with about 50-60 entrepreneurs.  Over the course of our meetings, we’ve often come across people in the same predicament: A Brilliant Entrepreneur (let’s call him Abe) with no technical experience has a great idea for a web or mobile app. Abe’s ready to [...]

Since the launch of Startup Giraffe I’ve had the opportunity to speak to 50+ idea stage entrepreneurs.  I’ve been amazed at the diversity of good ideas that folks from outside of the startup scene have.  Through conversations with them I’ve realized that many could improve the way they think about launching products.  Here are some [...]